Sudden Impact: Crime and Punishment (Updated)

While this morning’s NCAA pronouncement implementing punishment and imposing additional bureaucracy upon Penn State athletics hit the mark for many Penn State haters, who use the Sandusky scandal to declare everything up to and including targeted nuclear weapons as fair game (sanctimoniously stating that even nukes won’t restore normal lives for the victims), many of us believe that the punishment was vindictive and draconian. And it still won’t restore normal lives for the victims.

I have selected two essays that engender the latter viewpoint, both published in Sports Illustrated’s SI.com. Fortunately, there are still some writers out there with the balls to contradict the common wisdom.

July 24 Update: added link to a great essay by Spencer Hall of SBNation.

The first, by Stewart Mandel, is entitled “NCAA’s Mark Emmert overstepped bounds in hammering Penn State.” Mandel feels that NCAA President Mark Emmert, enabled by the logic of the Penn State hater mentioned above, felt that he could justify going far beyond the pale to invent creative, crippling penalties for the Nittany Lions. Mandel sees this as high visibility hypocrisy, and his article is definitely worth a read.

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The other, by Michael Rosenberg, is “NCAA sanctions against Penn State reinforce overemphasis on winning.” Rosenberg thinks that by prescribing these sanctions “Emmert is not fighting against the hypocrisy of college sports. He is acknowledging it, legitimizing it, and — in a way — even embracing it.” Read it for more strongly worded pearls of Rosenberg wisdom.

It makes sense for the NCAA to protect its product. It also makes sense of the coldest kind for Mark Emmert, head of the organization, to take a defenseless Penn State, prop it up on stage, and then take a few delighted whacks at its staggering corpse with the heaviest hammer imaginable. The key is not killing the victim, the Penn State football program. It will now be toured through every stage of the redemption cycle, and eventually brought forth as a model citizen at the appropriate date by a fully empowered oversight authority — one that can now, with the consent of its backers, make bigger, more immediate show trials of its thoroughly fixed bouts.

That piece is brilliant. I had difficulty choosing a paragraph to quote because each one hit the mark so well. I settled on:

What would I have the NCAA do here? Absolutely shit-nothing. After all, it’s what they do most of the time. Ideally, I’d like them to evaporate overnight, and simply cease to exist. That will not happen, so I would instead like them to admit what they’re doing: stabbing a corpse, and then demanding some public recognition of their ersatz bravery. I would like them to admit they are seizing a horrific moment in time to advance their own fartgassy agenda, and then demanding credit for it. They will burn an effigy after the courts have already done the hard work of humanity.

I think I want to include that link in this article. Thanks for pointing me to it!

I agree with you, Lizzie. The NCAA saw a prime opportunity to flex its muscles for all the other member institutions to see. It can be argued both ways that this was or wasn’t an athletics issue that was or wasn’t within the purview of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association, for you foreigners 🙂 ). However, if the legendary coach had a character flaw and the coach was fired and replaced, doesn’t that pretty much solve the problem? After all, it took Paterno 50 years at Penn State to fully consolidate his power; if his replacement hangs around for one-tenth of that time it will be amazing.

Yeah, most of the sanctions were gratuitous. Only the first of them, which creates an endowment for sexually abused children makes any sense in the context of the unassailable moral high ground assumed by the NCAA. The rest seem draconian, sadistic, and vindictive.

I suppose that the NCAA, Emmert particularly, knew that PSU would throw itself on its sword, so it pulled out all the stops. I think that Erickson should have at least provided one layer of resistance, but he just offered the university up for sacrifice.

I guess he was afraid to be categorized by our black/white society as a child rapist facilitator.

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Whodat Turkey?

The Nittany Turkey is a retired techno-geek who thinks he knows something about Penn State football and everything else in the world. If there's a topic, we have an opinion on it, and you know what "they" say about opinions! Most of what is posted here involves a heavy dose of hip-shooting conjecture, but unlike some other blogs, we don't represent it as fact. Read More…